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Prisons offer a public health opportunity to access a group with multiple and complex needs and return them to the community with improved health. However, prisons are not conducive to optimal health and there are few frameworks to guide efforts. This study aims to generate insights into health literacy across a young adult prison population, specifically examining the level of limitations, barriers and characteristics associated with these limitations.

The study took place in a single prison in England for young adult men aged 18–21 years old. A mixed-methods design was adopted with 104 young men completing a quantitative survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews with 37 young men.

72% (n = 75) of young men scored as limited in their health literacy. Barriers included structural restrictions, limited access to formal support and social and natural disruptions. No demographic characteristics or smoking intentions/behaviours predicted limited health literacy, but characteristics of the prison were predictive. Physical problems (sleep, nausea, tiredness and headaches), mental health and well-being (anxiety, depression and affect) and somatisation problems were also predictive of limitations.

Prison healthcare services and commissioners should undertake regular health literacy needs assessments to support developments in reducing barriers to healthcare and increasing health improvement efforts. Action also requires greater political will and investment to consider broader action on the wider determinants of (prison) health.

The study provides a framework to understand and guide prison health efforts and highlights attention needed at the level of governments, prison leaders and their health systems.

Entrepreneurship is shaped by a male norm, which has been widely demonstrated in qualitative studies. The authors strive to complement these methods by a quantitative approach. First, gender role stereotypes were measured in entrepreneurship. Second, the explicit notions of participants were captured when they described entrepreneurs. Therefore, this paper aims to revisit gender role stereotypes among young adults.

To measure stereotyping, participants were asked to describe entrepreneurs in general and either women or men in general. The Schein Descriptive Index (SDI) for characterization was used. Following the procedures of Schein (1975), intra-class-correlation was calculated as a measure of congruence. This approach was complemented by controlling explicit notions, i.e. the image that participants had when describing entrepreneurs.

The images of men and entrepreneurs show a high and significant congruence (r = 0.803), mostly in those adjectives that are untypical for men and entrepreneurs. The congruence of women and entrepreneurs was low (r = 0.152) and insignificant. Contrary to the participants’ beliefs, their explicit notions did not have any effect on measures of congruence. However, young adults who knew business owners in their surroundings rated the congruence of women and entrepreneurs significantly higher (r = 0.272) than average.

This study is unique in combining “implicit” stereotypes and explicit notions. It demonstrates that gender stereotypes in entrepreneurship are powerful. The image of the entrepreneur remains male, independent of explicit notions. As young adults who knew business owners in their surroundings rated the congruence of women and entrepreneurs higher, this could be a starting point for education programmes.

Purpose: Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) young adults smoke at rates much higher than the general population. Young adults, in general, are less likely to seek medical help for smoking cessation and LGB individuals are less likely to seek health care generally. Alternative methods to encourage smoking cessation are necessary. This research seeks to establish whether LGB young adults in California would be willing to use social media for smoking cessation.

Approach: We conducted 41 qualitative interviews among LGB young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles in Fall 2014.

Findings: The results suggest that our participants were interested in a LGB-focused social media intervention, as long as the intervention was private or anonymous and moderated. Further, across topical areas our participants spoke extensively about the import of social connections. We may be able to leverage these connections to encourage cessation.

Research Limitations: This is a qualitative, non-generalizable dataset from a fairly limited geographic area.

Public Health Implications: Online smoking cessation interventions aimed at young adults would benefit from further testing with LGB young adults to ensure efficacy among this population. In addition, states and localities concerned about young adult LGB smoking might benefit from investing in an online socially mediated cessation forum. Online interventions could be scalable and might be useful for other groups who regularly face discrimination, stigma, or other stressors that make successful smoking cessation difficult.

The purpose of this paper is to achieve a greater understanding of the transitions young adults experience into and out of the labour market and the influence that gender and married/cohabiting status have on employment careers.

The paper focuses on young adults (25-34 years old) in four European countries – Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and Norway – that are representative of different youth transition regimes. Using longitudinal data from EU-SILC survey (for the years 2006-2012) and event history analysis, the authors investigate the effect of the particular set of institutional features of each country, the effect of the cohort of entry and the effect of gender differences in determining transitions across labour market status.

Findings show that the filter exercised by the national institutions has a selective impact on the careers of young adults, with some institutional contexts more protective than others. In this respect, the condition of inactivity emerges as an interesting finding: on one side, it mainly involves women in a partnership, on the other side it is more common in protective youth regimes, suggesting that it may be a chosen rather than suffered condition.

The paper contributes to existing literature by: focusing on a specific category, young adults from 25 to 34 years old, which is increasingly recognised as a critical stage in the life course though it receives less attention than its younger counterpart (15-24); integrating the importance of family dynamics on work careers by analysing the different effects played by married/cohabiting status for men and women.

The purpose of this paper is to derive the determinants of young adults’ subjective and objective risk attitude in theoretical and real-world financial decisions. Furthermore, a comparison of the factors that influence young adults’ and older adults’ risk attitude is provided.

The paper relies on an experimental setting and a cross-sectional field study using data of the German central bank’s (Deutsche Bundesbank) PHF-Survey.

Young adults’ objective risk aversion is not constant but increases with stake sizes. Furthermore, young adults’ subjective risk attitude is a better predictor for their objective risk attitude than a set of commonly employed socio-demographics and economics like age or income. Moreover, young adults’ subjective risk attitude works as a mediator for the influence of their investable financial wealth on their objective risk attitude. Although young adults’ subjective risk attitude shows a gender effect, the influence of young adults’ gender on their objective risk attitude decreases with higher stake sizes. Compared to older adults, young adults generally show a similar degree of subjective risk aversion. However, due to stronger financial restrictions, young adults show a higher degree of objective risk aversion.

Although individuals’ financial outcomes depend on the financial behavior established in young adulthood, there is no study that simultaneously analyzes the determinants of young adults’ subjective and objective risk attitude in real-world financial decisions with a focus on young adults as a separate age group. The paper closes this gap in literature and additionally provides a comparison of the subsamples of young adults and older adults. The analysis in this paper reveals that young adults’ lower engagement in financial markets is primarily driven by their tight budget and not by a fundamental different subjective risk attitude.

The paper examines young adults’ perspectives on and experiences of job insecurity, including both objective insecurity and perceived uncertainty, as they emerged in a series of focus groups and interviews. It discusses young adults’ changing notions of security and career, effects of insecurity and uncertainty on planning future work and non work lives for people with different levels of occupational skills and qualifications, the gendered effects of insecurity and the impact of insecure employment on attitudes to employers. The impact of perceptions and experiences of job insecurity on young men and women’s expectations of work are considered in terms of a changing psychological contract.

Despite increasingly persuasive women-focused marketing of gambling products, there has only been limited investigation around women sports betting. Men remain the focus of much of the conversation about sports betting as they have generally been found to be the most active sports bettors and the most at risk of experiencing harms associated with their behaviour. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring the characteristics of young women sports bettors in the United Kingdom and the relationship between sports betting and the experience of gambling harms. To do this, we created two models of analysis. Our analysis is based on data from the first wave (2019) of the Emerging Adults Gambling Survey (EAGS) dataset (n = 3,549). The EAGS is a non-probability longitudinal survey that includes individuals between the ages of 16 and 24 who were residents in Britain at the time of data collection. Firstly, we examined the associations between women sports bettors and several factors identified as important predictors of sports betting. Secondly, we sought to understand the relationship between women's sports betting and the harms associated with this activity. From these models, we found that women's sports betting was most reliably predicted according to fandom and peer influence. We also found that women sports bettors were more at risk of experiencing harms associated with difficulties with family and friends than women gamblers using other products.

This paper's aim is to explore the available evidence on whether becoming a young father can enhance desistance.

Recent literature on young fathers in the justice system was reviewed, alongside the major desistance theories. The findings from the review were explored in five semi‐structured interviews with five young fathers under probation supervision.

Despite the correlation between young fatherhood and offending, very little research has been conducted into the impact of young fatherhood on desistance from crime. Overall, there are good indicators that fatherhood can be a motivational “hook” for enhancing desistance.

Very little is known about the experience or context of fatherhood amongst young male offenders, nor about the relation between young fatherhood and desistance from crime. This paper fills some of the gaps.

The aim of this paper is to examine consumers' perceptions and expectations towards healthy snacks, with particular emphasis on the cereal snack market, and to explore new areas of opportunities for healthy snacks by identifying consumer needs and wants.

Six focus group discussions were conducted to generate attitudinal data across three different adult consumer groups.

Results revealed that consumers expected a healthy snack to contain low levels of calories, fat, salt and sugar, and to contain high levels of whole‐grain, oats, bran, nuts, seeds, pulses and fruit, e.g. blueberries, cranberries, gogi berries. Additionally, healthy snacks were required to be free from any artificial colours, sweeteners and flavours. Major factors encouraging healthy snack consumption included reduced risk of weight gain, diabetes, heart burn and bloating. Conversely, perceived taste, portion size, the lack of available convenient nutritional snacks, accessibility and confusion over the credibility of the “healthy product” tag were the main factors preventing healthy consumption in the adult population examined. Consumers expressed a desire for a wider choice of filling snacks with specific health benefits for a variety of usage occasions, particularly those with associated health claims such as “high fibre”, “omega 3 for mental health” and “reduces cholesterol”.

The study sample size was not extensive and was limited to a small geographical spread of Dublin and Meath on the East coast of Ireland. A more representative sample of the entire Irish population could be the basis for further research.

These findings increase the understanding of current expectations of the Irish adult consumer regarding healthy snack foods. They also highlight the potential new product development opportunities for snack food manufacturers to explore.

The present paper focuses specifically on healthy snacks and contributes to a limited amount of existing literature by providing consumer research for the development of new healthy snack foods.

Older adults’ sexual health is becoming an increasingly important component of healthy aging in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and rising infection rates among this age cohort. The increase in HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the older adult population ignites the need to understand the reasons why older adults are omitted from HIV/AIDS prevention education policy.

This chapter examines the social forces that influence HIV/AIDS policy at the state and community levels. Through qualitative methodology and analysis, including interviews with state policymakers and managers of AIDS service organizations in four Midwestern states (n=31), I look for trends and patterns as to whether or not older adults are considered as an “at-risk” group for HIV infection.

Findings reveal that HIV/AIDS policy may be impacted by enduring sexual scripts about older adults. To some extent both state policymakers and AIDS service organization personnel adhere to stereotypes about older adults’ sexuality and sexual activity, which is then implemented in their health promotion activities. The result is that gaps exist in HIV/AIDS prevention education for older adults, despite the fact that current trends show an increase in new HIV infections and AIDS diagnoses among people over the age of 50.

While this is an exploratory study of the available HIV/AIDS prevention education and health promotion activities for older adults, as well as the viewpoints of state policymakers and AIDS service organization personnel, the findings do indicate the need for additional research on the potentially dangerous sexual behaviors – lack of HIV testing, low condom usage, multiple partners – exhibited by older adults. Future research involving interviews with older adults, physicians, and medical personnel may add new perspectives to the current research.

As the baby boomers continue to age and challenge cultural stereotypes of sexual behaviors among older adults, research in the area of sexual health and HIV/AIDS prevention education will remain an important component of healthy aging. This research begins what will ultimately be a necessary conversation.